Friday, October 30, 2009

Web site design

Web site design is a complex subject because there are so many different approaches to an effective web site. As always in marketing, think about the target audience and corporate objectives first. We looked in class at some ecommerce sites that seemed busy but yet were successful because that layout is what the audience wanted to see. In general, it is useful to have the purpose of the website and any relevant offer in the upper left hand 'golden triangle' area of the site. Often this area is a good place to put a search function as well as the reader's eye will go to the upper left first. We get this information from tracking eyeball movements for many subjects and displaying them on a 'heat map.' The heat map shows where people click on the site, that cearly 'above the fold' is where eyes are resting and how eye movements also form an "F" shape inside the Golden Triangle. The heat map of a Google web search shows why people want to be in the top three or four searches. http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/79 We looked at ideas on web design from Mary Lou Roberts, Jan Zimmerman, Amy Africa and finally, Dr. Zahay! Some independent sources for good web design and customer service are Forrester.com and Bizrate.com. Dr. Zahay likes sites that load easily, use breadcrumbs, are easy to naviagate, use 2-3, clicks, and have easily available contact information. Trust is an important part of web site design because the user must trust the site to exchange information or do business with the site. Even so, the students said they do not look at Truste or other trust seals on the web in deciding to do business with the site. Again, for marketing, web site design and usability are strategic and not technical issues. Web site development is often iterative as companies find out what works and what doesn't in web site design and make changes accordingly.

SEO and SEM

We learned about Search Engine Optimization, the process of optimizing a site for Organic or Natural Search and about Search Engine Marketing, the process of using piad search. Both processes are designed to drive traffic to a web site. Many people are amazed that by a few adjustments to a web page can bring dramatic results in terms of natural or organic search rankings. Making use of the blue title, linking in and out to relevant pages, making page content relevant to the title and subject of the page are all great ways to improve ranking. I shared the story that when I came to NIU the Interactive Marketing web site did not rank that highly and that I followed basic SEO principles to get the page ranked highly with natural search. Often we recommend that companies use a PPC, pay per click campaign thru google adwords or yahoo to understand which search terms are most relevant. It is easy to see by how much it costs to be listed under a PPC program which terms are going to get the most exposure for the company. A combination of natural and paid search usually works well in driving traffic to the site. The students enjoyed watching Cary Pearlman set up a live Google adwords campaign for them and I will go thru my Google Analytics next week.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Email Marketing/Mobile

We had a good discussion on email marketing before I left for DMA and then learned the Email Marketing tool Exact Target. We learned the reason to use a tool like ET is the ability to get emails past potential spam filters that ISP's might set up and to manage many different emails effectively. The ability to include dynamic content for personalized offers is also a big plus of this type of system. A company such as Careerbuilder.com might send millions of emails per month and needs to effectively manage and track campaigns. Even though email marketing is a small percentage of total online advertising, its ability to target customers and be integrated within an overall multiple channel marketing campaign makes email an important and influential medium. Good emails have an effective and descriptive subject line and a clear offer or purpose. While email open rates remain higher than those of direct mail, we learned that same week at the CADM monthly luncheon program on mobile marketing that mobile emails can have an over 70% response rate! It seems as each new type of way to reach the customer comes on the scene response rates are high and then level off, but I am thinking mobile rates might remain high. People read their text messages within seconds typically instead of days or hours for email. We also learned how to identify "phishing" emails that want to get personal information for fraudulent purposes and about the CAN-SPAM act and how to remain compliant. Good email marketers want to follow the guidelines of that act and comply by having a subject line that clearly states the advertising purpose of the email and is consistent with the body of the email, a valid reply to address, a physical address and an unsubscribe provision.

Friday, October 9, 2009

Search engine marketing & Guests

We had two guest speakers in the past week and a half. One was Gimmepleez.com, relating to our project to produce a YouTube video. The other speaker was restaurant.com CEO and President Cary Chessick. Students enjoy hearing Cary's story of how restaurant.com started and how it had changed its business model over time and has evolved to the brokerage model it uses today. I refer students in the class to links to the video on these speakers. Students wishing to work on the Professional Sales Program who did not hear Dr. Weilbaker speak in class can feel free to set up a meeting with him or talk to either of us about the project.

We started SEM, Search Engine Marketing this week and will continue with the topic on the 20th and 22nd. On the 20th Cary Pearlman will teach our class in PPC (Pay Per Click) and we will have a lab on the 23rd. I introduced the area of SEM and we looked at a sample google search and pointed out the paid ads versus the natural search results. We talked about Gooogle having 70% of the search engine market and that almost fifty percent of internet advertising is in search engine advertising spending. For this reason even though online advertising spending has dropped this year Q1 09 versus Q2 09 by about ten percent, search engine spending continues to rise. We talked about SEO being the process of optimizing organic or natural search. There is a lot companies can do to optimize their organic search efforts and get high page rankings without spending money. these tactics include a descriptive title bar, text that matches the title bar and is descriptive of the subject matter, links to and from related, relevant sites and appropriate keywords (although the latter is less important now). Search engine spiders or crawlers use complicated algorithms as they search through pages to determine if a page is a good fit with a particular search term. Images need to be tagged and spiders have a hard time with flash intro pages as well. I always enjoy teaching this topic and look forward to the rest of the time we will spend on SEO and Paid Search.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Internet Advertising

We talked last week about internet advertising and the fact that much of internet advertising is concentrated on search engine marketing, which is why we will focus on search engine marketing in class. The advertising business model is difficult to sustain because most internet advertising is focused on the top ten portal sites and it is hard to attract advertisers to a specialized, smaller, web site. The focus of marketers is on push versus pull marketing and there are more and different media forms each day such as blogging, podcasts, RSS, social media, etc. The marketing job is more complicated. These tools are used even in B2B marketing, with information-based tools such as e-zines being effective in B2B. We talked about the evolution from contextual to behavioral advertising, and then ended with an overview of viral video marketing. Short, quirky, engaging, funny and shocking works! This type of advertising is in its infancy so we will all be learning together for our class project. Don't forget to check out the tips in the links I provided in the class notes.